Call It Horses

by Jessie van Eerden

  “Thank you, Lottie,” I said. “I brought you a pint of beets, there on the woodstove. You ought to sit with us.”

  No, no, she slipped out, having studied my face.

  Clay sat down across from me. He gave the jam jar a quarter turn as if to have the label pointing a certain way, to create a triangulation with the label on the margarine tub and the label on the real-deal maple syrup. Don’t, I thought, my throat got thick. I’d worn a loose white button-up blouse with thin capped sleeves because it looked feminine, my skin browning already from the garden work, my upper arms dense. I had kept slender enough though I had to resist the curve starting in my shoulders, always cautioned by Miranda’s slight humpback. I was attractive enough with a thin oval face, though I wore a look of severity I couldn’t help, and premature lines creased my forehead as if to stress my overthinking. Clay had competent hands. He looked briefly to the V of my blouse.

  He’d clerked at Matlick Feed as a kid, stocking shelves, turning the labels out, the way he might turn my body. He would be fifty in October. My tied-back hair pulled at my temples, too tightly held in place, none of it gray yet.

  “We aren’t kids, Clay,” I said.

  “Well, no,” he said. Pinched his voice.

  I’d been a kid when he’d signed on to plow snow and lay blacktop for the State. He’d surely been steady and hungry-within-limits like an Eagle Scout. Would he have ever gone beyond? Would he have taken the oval rubber change purse we found in the birthday box in Sunday School at Snyder’s Crossing, Jesus Saves on one side, the slit on the other, taken it to the woods like Dillon and Clarissa and me—three inseparable friends then—and squeezed top to bottom so the slit puckered open for the insertion of change, labial and suggestive? The indelicate Dillon who was my mirror self, who was two years younger, the boy version of me with hair just as thick-black as mine and ways just as solitary, and Clarissa like a honey-haired doll who loved us both for nothing and who melted to a blush as he stuck his tongue in the purse.

  “We’re not kids,” Clay softly repeated, nasal and coaxing. He served me bacon. “Love can grow. After, sometimes.”

  In my throat, a mean clog. Usually I’d stand, stretch my body, unslump, make passage for air. But I sat, breathing poorly, I eyed the walls, I watched all the blue-bonneted girls. A wheeze threatened in Lottie’s kitchen, though I had long outgrown full-blown asthmatic attacks. I stacked two pancakes on my plate and felt the weak lung and the urge to run. My feet tested the spring offered in the linoleum.

  I could always run fast as a kid, especially during the years I played basketball. I went nights to the school gymnasium to run suicides in the green glow of the emergency lights—baseline, foul line, half court, again, then some pretend one-on-one to work on my layup, to work on my lung power.

  Clay made conversation about the gospel band, about his bass player Stew getting a new amp—but I didn’t want to hear about dark-eyed, rangy Stew—and about my cousin Ron, one of Rex and Miranda’s twins, the one who stuttered, starting entry-level with the State that month, as if to say, See? We can talk like husband and wife over bacon in the kitchen.

  What happened was strange, Ruth. The magma in me had bypassed the eruption and running-over, had transformed straight to ashes and a few cinders. My ashes shook down at the kitchen table. The hard No was a cinder left lodged there in the grate. I could not utter it. I should have uttered it.

  Into my head pierced a sharp memory—I was a phantom point guard beating it to the baseline and dribbling like a crazy. The grade school box gym could contain me and channel me. Then, out into the night, heading home with a gym bag to Mother and Dad who were not yet specters but living people at sink and TV and supper, with a tub of Country Crock half full like Clay’s.

  There was a bird. I sloughed my gym bag and shoes at the hearth. I unbanded my hair and wore it like a piece of clothing, my nubby basketball under my arm. Mother’s radio played, also the TV, but I heard flapping in the chimney. I put my ear to the cool stone. A bird is trapped, I said. It can’t fly out. She spoke to him acidly, Why didn’t you put wire mesh up there to keep them out? And he said, It’ll get free, Margot, it’s nothing to worry about. Tended the TV antenna with his gentle, limp hands. She pursed her face shut. Early fall, so there was no fire, only soot. The damper, when I tried it, was jammed fast, and the bird flapped like mad. It’s a warbler, I said, though how would I have known that? I did not see it yellow like a Christmas ball, but I did. It flapped and stirred the summer soot into a suffocating cloud, the frail wings scraping against the chimney wall and sparking. And then, after a time, silence. I stood there. She turned off the radio and wiped her apron with a disapproving air.

  See? Dad said toward the TV, his voice always sounding shoved down in a bucket. They fly back out.

  My mother’s face flint.

  But wasn’t there yet a faint glowing heartbeat? Wasn’t there, Ruth, in the name warbler on my lips? I mouthed it, I whispered. Behind the stone and behind my eyes, it lived, barely. The silence did not mean escape. Silence meant the bird would join the others that came before it, that I’d pull the damper open one day and bird bones would hail down—how many skeletons in the chimney? A thought so horrible, my breath grew inaccessible, my throat a clogged straw. I bolted out the screen door in my sock feet, my mother righteously calling after, and ran from the bones I knew had piled there, not toward Mave’s next door but toward the woods and the Train Cave. I got into the nettles, I hit a hard locust tree and drew lip blood and ran on. I could run fast on very little breath at that age, did not yet need the paper bag to hyperventilate into. I could regulate it myself. I stopped only where the moss went black at the swamp edge. I followed its creeping boundary into the cave mouth, I ducked in and stood in the dark damp expanse of limestone. There was the silent wet wall, the long hush of things so previous to me and more hidden than myself. My lip bled. I wore a Nite Glo bracelet, a jelly wire my teammate Liza had given me, and one to Clarissa too, and it made light by itself. The warbler was in complete darkness and walled—it wheezed, I wheezed—yet, as I imagined it there, I saw it shimmering with light, so it, too, must have made light by itself, in the chimney soot. A self-generated glow.

  Standing motionless in the limestone, in the strange cavern so high a train could pass, my girl torso, shoulders, narrow neck could have made a chimney, and there could have been dead birds in me. I breathed. Bats rustled high, my legs stung with nettle. The bones, the odd yellow light of the jelly bracelet. Feather and remnant. I touched the damp cave wall and wrote with my finger one of the hieroglyphs you had taught me in a letter, one of the tall hieratic signs, the cursive bird looking to the right.

  Clay said he’d get down on one knee if I wanted. My sprinter feet eased down onto the linoleum of Lottie’s kitchen. I got as far as the nettle-feel on my calves under the jeans I wore now with the pretty white blouse. The nettle-feel was as far as I got before I stopped. In my stomach, a sharp frail thing went dull, wing into soot, but something stubbornly glowed. My throat opened, and I reached for the syrup and coated the cold pancake perfect in size and shape.

  I knew love would not grow. But since I did not feel all that capable of love, I told him yes.

  MY OWN HOUSE NEXT TO MAVE’S, the clapboard house I’d grown up in, had a fishhook floor plan and narrow stairs that climbed to no hallway, only to a room on the right and one on the left. The front porch opened into a laundry room with an exposed water heater and furnace and deep freezer which should have been stowed elsewhere. Then the kitchen with deep sinks and the rough-lumber table Mave had built when the Formica table bowed; then steps to the small cellar and a curve to the living room with the fireplace and to my bedroom, once my parents’ bedroom, tucked behind the stairs. The floors scrubbed clean, the smell of the piney oil, a hint of bleach.

  I rummaged in the bureau for the deed. Mave had paid off the mortgage for me with your money after Mother and Dad died and put only my name on the paper—Frances Donne. I studi
ed the small print to discern how I could keep it in my name. There, the paneling and drywall to which the deed referred, the light yellow of the kitchen, as though the legal claim brought things into being—the floor lamp, the framed picture of my parents and the smaller framed reproduction of a Klimt painting, a page torn from Mave’s book which had been your book. There, the beets in the kitchen and the graduated cast iron stacked on the counter, one lifted out and rounded with cornbread half gone and foiled over. I would tell Clay I needed to keep the place for the bronze plant co-op meetings. Which was true.

  It was noon. I stepped out on the porch for Saturday’s mail, scanned Mave’s house through the fence break, looking for signs of life. Two stories junked up and about to implode, always the lingering scent of grime and mold, tar paper patching the roof.

  I had a letter in the box from my old friend, Liza. Between the Shop ’n Save circular and an offer from Discount Tire, her married name and Streetsboro, Ohio. Five pages front and back in barely legible cursive that blew forward like a sandstorm. Sorry I haven’t written since last year, she started—the business had kept her busy, a husband-and-wife team mowing yards and shoveling truckloads of mulch. She gave a full page to the day she ran over a white-faced hornet nest in the ground, sucked up their rage into her mower that spit it out the clippings chute, and she was swollen for two weeks. And once she ran over a sleeping baby blacksnake and cut it in pieces. At least she still had her horses, she wrote, and a Presbyterian church she liked for the way it followed the same order each week. She’d always had horses here, two or three ponies, to pet and ride, nothing to show. She’d always liked order. Sometimes joy is a sacrifice, she wrote. My husband Gary died last week, she wrote—the line buried in the sand on page four, as though she had needed to build up courage to write it. But she still heard herself tell people she’s on a husband-and-wife mowing team—isn’t that strange? Out from between the fourth and fifth pages slipped a photocopied Caudell Journal newspaper clipping with a photo of our old basketball team. LaFaber Bronze Girls League, sponsored by the plant Clarissa and I both eventually went to work for. Liza had found the clipping in a drawer while packing to move back home to stay with her mother. She had copied it for each of us, Clarissa and me.

  There I was, stringy and already fighting curvature in my shoulders. There was our Liza. Her eyes bugged, her curls gelled in a neat arrangement, her stance tidy. And there the gentle Clarissa. I would have to call her. Liza was moving back. I pictured Liza stung by hornets, stingers stuck under hems she would have carefully sewn herself, the chaos of it harder on her than the poison’s pain. And now the chaos of grief. I held up the pages, translucent, to the kitchen light. All the words of the letter grit and blown.

  I smelled of bacon. Was it selfish to want to take back the morning hours before I’d climbed Clay and Lottie’s porch and entered that house that lay under the hill, nearer town than mine? The hours when I’d still been noncommittal up here, and proud and cold and alone, on the higher hillside that breathed—I did not like to be down under, I would not like that about Clay’s house. The Bible still lay open by the foiled cornbread, which was probably about to turn and I should have put it in the fridge. An aged, burdensome heft, my mother’s Bible with black faux-leather binding and silver letters at the bottom, Margot Augusta Donne. A sheafed-out tumor that wouldn’t go away.

  “We too must write Bibles,” said Mave to me once over hotdogs. “So sayeth Emerson.” Scooting away her sister’s Bible, as if it were an animal skull.

  And like a skull, it drew me. The Word, the world of my mother—how could it not? It was a kind of original, rough ground.

  In those morning hours, I had looked for the I Am in Revelation—the one affixed to Clay’s guitar case—the one who is and who was and who is to come, a girth stretched across eternity. Yet isn’t the I Am a moment, a morsel of time, or maybe a pocket? I’d crossed out a few words and scribbled a few of my own in the thin rustling margin. Blackberry thicket. Once, I had cleared a dome for a doe in the young, soft briers. Here—gnaw on that, bed down in it, I said to the doe. Time itself was the brier room, a brief enclave in eternity that made you itch with confusion, but at least it was shelter.

  Under the bacon I could almost smell my musty girl odor and taste the after-game sweat on my upper lip. A portal opened between the Caudell Journal girl—Number 25, a basketball held to her belly—and my thirty-five-year-old self engaged to be married and learning of Liza’s fresh widowhood. The morning now felt like twenty years ago, and the coming night like another country.

  There was Liza, running a Weed Eater with safety goggles on.

  Dear Liza.

  I would write her—I would retrieve the Discount Tire ad from the trash and write on the backside. A letter within a letter, Ruth. From the team photo on the table, our small eyes looked out from the grainy half-circle of our bodies and hair and scratchy uniforms—Liza a well-managed, capable forward, married for how many years, and Clarissa with the most delicate fringe of bangs and a curvy body that sat the bench unless we had at least a ten-point lead and it was fourth quarter, married for years now too, to Darrell who hit her—did Liza know that? When he’d first slapped Clarissa, she’d driven her Toyota to my house and stood at my front door as if a weight pulled her head down to one side, and her fair hair fell in pieces across her face, like a horse’s mane. I gave her a bag of ice wrapped in a towel, I put her in Mother and Dad’s old bed, and I drove my truck three miles east to the Tide family’s farm. I scanned the evening horizon of alfalfa field until I saw Darrell’s stout figure rendered small and harmless by distance. I took the pocked right-of-way as far as I could in the pickup then got out, grabbed the tire iron from the bed, and walked the rest of the way to find him mending fence, and he said my name as a question. I pointed the heavy tool in reply, and a hint of a smile might have curled his lip mostly hidden by moustache.

  “What’s this about, Frankie?”

  “Don’t you ever,” I said. “Never again.” What was I going to do? Beat him bloody? He neither denied the slap nor swore off it. I drove home knowing I could protect no one. And now, looking at our three younger faces, I felt again the keen exposure for which there is no protection—not from hornets, not from battery, not from grief.

  On the back of the ad, I drew our young bodies as horses, small stick-figure ponies, each its own fateful letter, a sound uttered beside the deal for winter tread.

  EVERYBODY SAID I WAS GOOD ENOUGH IN THE NINTH GRADE to play for the boys’ team. There was no high school girls’ basketball in 1968, only the community league the plant sponsored. But I wasn’t skilled. I was forceful, I was scrappy. I dribbled poorly, passed too hard, and shot lead balls two-handed, but I was fast and could rebound. Most games I fouled out. I had one good move, and I lived for it: I’d steal the ball and hurl myself down court for a fast break, barely managing the dribble, and my body—ever cordoned off—stopped sensing its boundaries. I felt everything at once in the tiny community building gym as I drove without grace to the basket. The building doubled for our games and—with the hoops folded up to the ceiling—baby showers and spaghetti dinners and gun shows. The smell of concessions lingered always: popcorn and hotdogs on a reel, nicotine mouths of coaches chewing Juicy Fruit. Driving to the basket, I gulped in all the adolescent salt and skunkiness, someone’s perfume, the milling around of women eating cake and laughing at a shower, the caving in and down of the bleachers where hundreds sat because the scattered twenty people each had so many selves and histories, and each sound they made ricocheted against the cinderblock walls and multiplied.

  That’s when I could always feel Dillon.

  My second self, a shadow with heat.

  I could smell his burnt smell and feel the goldening of his skin from his afterschool work at LaFaber’s foundry. He was too young to work legally but they gave him some hours anyway. His body lengthened in those hours of flame and then he slipped into the community building to watch us girls play. I we
nt in for that layup able to see myself from outside, how he could see me, and if I scored I could blame that thrill for the electric shocks moving up my legs. It was not sexual in a way I could have separated out and named. At fourteen, I still felt equal parts male and female. Dillon and I swapped clothes, we fished blue gill in Heather Run with wetted oats, brown sugar, and soybean meal balled up into bait. I tented my hands over his eyes, lying in the sun. He weaved yellow yarn into my black hair.

  After games, I was limp and wrung, and the close bodies of the girls were bright. I moved with Clarissa and Liza in a hot huddle, the three of us a little on fire and a little sleepy. We went to Liza’s and jumped on her trampoline, though we were too old for it, then lay on the springy surface that dented under our butts and shoulder blades and tilted us toward each other. The trampoline sat near a slope that ran down to the dog pens and neat pullet cages that chirred out their constant sound, the circumference of the trampoline the edge of our young-girl heat. They teased me about him, but I’d say no, it was Clarissa he wanted, and I’d do a steamroll over both of them with hands crossed over my chest like a corpse to make them laugh. And I believed it because she was the one all the boys watched, Darrell Tide in particular, who was then a high school senior. She had real breasts and wanted to quit the team because the running and jarring hurt her; I had almost enough to cup with a very small hand.

  We lay there until we grew cold, until the brightness of our bodies dimmed and we pulled back into ourselves. I wanted to stay out there longer, alone, to outspread my arms and legs with no sweater. I wanted to be cold.